(Interview originally published on Ymag. Go read the first and the second part.)

Nicola: A couple more questions about the Zuidas. You work with urban issues a lot, and – when it comes to Amsterdam – two things come to mind: housing shortage and the myth of the “Creative City”. Given the “business district” profile of the Zuidas, how does the artist, most stereotypically associated with a bohemian lifestyle, relate to such an environment? After information aesthetics, can we talk about business aesthetics?

Tom: As more and more business districts pop up, they form a kind of global grid of financial activity and influence. In a sense this is a new form or territoriality – in a topological space. As the power of multinational companies grows beyond that of states or cities, the networked space they consume can potentially one day declare itself a sovereign nation. (more…)

(Interview originally published on Ymag. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim unless specified otherwise. You can also read the beginning and the end of the interview.)

Two skyscrapers in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: I liked your video because it is visually simple and engaging, but at the same time dense with actuality. Both the Israeli military practices, which you also mention in your video, and the World Trade Center in Manhattan, from which the Zuidas are inspired, remind of a complex global scenario (as described by urban theorists like Saskia Sassen) where the urban sites of business and war’s battlegrounds are increasingly overlapping.As an Israeli artist, how do you feel this global dimension is affecting your work and what do you think is the best way to critically investigate it?

Tom: I often feel humbled by the flow of information in the 21st century. I used to look for an absolute truth while I was growing up in Israel, but now I don’t anymore. I accept the fact that media reality is increasingly overlapping and networked in all fields, including conflict. It becomes much more difficult to trace a clear reality in the flurry cauldron of opinions and stories. So I prefer to treat both quantitative and qualitative information as rumors or stories. But arguably politics finance and the military have always been cross-linked. In the book Lords of Finance as one example, Liaquat Ahmed describes how in 1694 a group of protestant city merchants got permission to form the Bank of England – with exclusive rights to service the government, in return for lending the government £1.2 million which saved the country from bankruptcy over a war with France. This happens throughout history. It’s just that with the volume of media flow today, the public experiences all of these complex networks as they are formed, in real time. So the data attack becomes as overwhelming as any powerful weapon. (more…)

(The interview was originally published on Ymag, where you can still read it. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim, unless specified otherwise.)

In occasion of The Smooth and The Striated, a Gilles Deleuze-inspired art exhibition which took place at the Nieuwe Dakota and Huize Frankendael venues in Amsterdam, I had the chance to meet Israeli artist Tom Tlalim. Tlalim has been living in the Netherlands for a decade now, and recently he has been in the new business district of De Zuidas in South Amsterdam for a five months residency at the Virtueel Museum Zuidas. The works he exhibited dealt with contemporary themes of conflict, politics, war, finance, and urbanization, while maintaining simple yet technologically-layered aesthetics. The long interview that follows (and which will be published in three parts) covers a variety of issues, ranging from the intersections of art and science to public ground privatization, from the contemporary role of the artist to the Palestine/Israel conflict. All with the urban landscape of the developing business district of De Zuidas as a background.

De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: First of all, before being an installation artist or a video-maker, you are a musician. While visiting the Zuidas myself, I noticed the landscape is quite desolated and dispersed and, apart from a few bars – for example near the metro stop, next to the Accenture building – the area is very quiet. How did the sound of the Zuidas inspire you?

Tom: It’s interesting that you indicate the location of the bars by their proximity to a multinational company building. This happens a lot at the Zuidas. For me it was essential to keep a critical view of the place in my work, and not to use readymades such as brand names or PR materials. I wanted to experience this environment for what it is and let my opinion on it form gradually. In such a politically charged environment, the info, news and views, however impartial they may seem, often do tend to reaffirm the brand by placing it on the map. (more…)

Image from http://uqbarorbistertius.blogspot.com/

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.

(more…)